Friday 4 January 2013 19.04 EST
First published on Friday 4 January 2013 19.04 EST

Michael K Williams and Clarke Peters in our first glimpse of The Wire, 2005. Photograph: BBC/HBO

2004: Wardrobe malfunction

SPOTTED! Grime "Alternatively called 8 bar, sub-low or eski… there's no particular structure, just an average 136+ BPM, lots of speaker-shattering bass, and tales of girls, guns, drug-dealing and the ultimate crowd-pleaser, 'slewing' – slagging off the competition a la Eminem in 8 Mile." Hattie Collins merks it

Jesus wept "If you're a male flagellation buff out for a night on the town with the girlfriend who hates Jerry Seinfeld and the rest of the children of Israel, I honestly can't think of a better date flick." Joe Queenan spots Mel Gibson's antisemitic streak in The Passion Of The Christ

Sign of the times The iTunes Music Store launches in June. "If one aspect of the iTunes Store might give the serious music fan pause," writes Andrew Mueller, "it is this: the rock'n'roll album, as the cultural artefact that we have known and loved all these years, is certainly dead."

SPOTTED! Arrested Development Though Charlie Brooker was already concerned about its long-term health. "Just make sure you tune in and get hooked: the more people watching, the less likely BBC are to 'do a Seinfeld' and start moving it restlessly around the timetables until it attains mythical status without anyone, bar the schedulers, knowing when it's on."

We didn't like Leigh Francis AKA Avid Merrion, who was on to his third series of the celeb-baiting Bo' Selecta! "At his very funniest, he is less amusing than finding blood in one's urine," decides Andrew Mueller.

We did like Shameless. "No words could sufficiently express the very goodness of this," asserts Julia Raeside.

Not-so-hot tips The year's most-hyped band are folky foursome the Magic Numbers. We duly stick them on the cover. Sadly, it emerges that the only vaguely exciting thing about the band is that they storm off TOTP in a huff after Richard Bacon introduces them as a "big fat melting pot of talent". "It was like saying, 'Here's a guy with blinding potential, Mr Stevie Wonder!'" grumbled singer Romeo Stodart.

Do You Remember? Channel 4's outer-orbit hoax Space Cadets, in which four gullible souls are convinced that they have embarked upon a space mission. Creator Ben Caudell gives The Guide the lowdown on the prank's planning: "As I write, our dress rehearsal has been brought to a halt by the actor playing the Russian bus driver loudly shouting, 'Anything behind me?' in a broad Brummie accent."

2006: Sexyback

Philip Glenister and John Simm in Life On Mars, one of the top TV hits of 1976, we mean 2006. Photograph: BBC/KUDOS

Letting the Jean genie out of the bottle Retromania goes mainstream with the advent of nod-wink time-travelling BBC dramedy Life On Mars, with Philip Glenister's DCI Gene Hunt having his chauvinistic cake and eating it. Jim Shelley gets an early butchers, and calls it right: "Life On Mars has got to be worth supporting. Madly over-ambitious, boisterous and colourful, Life On Mars is basically Doctor Who meets The Sweeney."

The dawn of suralan The Apprentice, now in its second series, has made a national wotsit of its grizzled, trigger-happy leading man: "Reality TV breeds unlikely heroes, but few quite so unlikely as Sir Alan Sugar," writes Michael Holden. "Over 12 weeks, last year's show transformed our perception of him from moody 1980s billionaire to icon of contemporary cool."

Snakes on the brain The patently ludicrous Snakes On A Plane is the beneficiary of a highly successful viral campaign, thus bypassing the critics entirely. Not that it was any good. "The most keenly anticipated film of 2006 is almost certainly going to be one of its worst," laments Andrew Mueller.

Promises, promises "His internet chatshows have broken all records, and made sidekick Karl a 'global village idiot'. But Ricky Gervais won't over-fish this surreal comedy resource, he tells Johnny Dee."

Tower of babble "The very worst of the post-Libertines shower is a godawful band called Towers Of London. They are so bad, they get their own reality show. If the mark of a successful music documentary is its ability to capture the essence of a band while also making them look a bit like characters out of Wacky Races, then Bravo's 10-part series, The Towers Of London, is a sash-wearing, bouquet-waving triumph. A scrambled-egg mess of phlegm, swearing, vomit, rudeness, nudeness, cheese-string limbs in wincingly narrow jeans, punk rock daftness, dumb-as-a-bell declarations of greatness and hair that looks as if it's been assembled from the contents of a hoover used to clean a field, it makes for astonishing viewing."

Bush whacked "He a very wise man and very strong – although perhaps not so strong as his father Barbara." Borat salutes George Bush in conversation with Rob Fitzpatrick.

2007: What's occurring?

Goodbye to… The OC "As The OC reached its final season, there was a sudden realisation that, actually, nobody really cared. There's not a great deal to mourn here. The deft script and smart, sudsy narrative have long since lost their way. Where the next teen fix will come from is anybody's guess."

Scenes from The Guide's 1,000th issue party, or possibly Skins from 2007.

Hello To… Skins "Two girls in it. One wears tiny skirts and kisses her boyfriend. The other one has anorexia and seems like a direct rip of the Bad Uncle girl from Nathan Barley. The boys are a Benetton selection of gay, stud and virgin. In the first episode they buy drugs, crash a party, crash a car and look pleased with themselves. Parents will hate it. A lot of kids will love it. But the Freaks And Geeks-savvy crowd will find it mildly patronising."

Trash talking We attend the final night of Erol Alkan's Trash, the club that popularised mash-ups and made indie cool again (for a bit). "A rammed, genre-smashing sweatbox that made Monday nights in London the biggest night of the week, Trash became a catalyst of cool, spawning a generation of clubs across the country," writes Leonie Cooper. "The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand, the White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, the Libertines, Arthur Baker, Jarvis Cocker, Muse, Lily Allen, the Kooks, Razorlight and Grace Jones were just the tip of the starry iceberg, and once Marilyn Manson turned on his heels and left after he was told there was no VIP area. Courtney Love turned up one night, and was subsequently asked to leave. 'She was being an arse,' says Erol."

It was all Cloverfields round here JJ Abrams's clever Cloverfield promo is the reason that people start getting more worked up about the trailers than the bleedin' films. "In just under two minutes it blends together the best bits of The Blair Witch Project, Independence Day, Godzilla, Planet Of The Apes and ties them together with the neat bow of post-9/11."

Big in 07: polar bears "For a supposedly endangered species, these animals are everywhere." So much so, in fact, that we decide to stick one on the cover.

Preston storms off Buzzcocks A man who was in a rubbish band, then on a reality show, walks off a quiz show. Seriously, it's a big deal. Eva Wiseman takes the time to peer into the poor lad's psyche: "Perhaps it was the sinking realisation that this was his life: this seat, those lights, these scripted jibes about his happy wife, the smell of sad comedians and unspent wit, the cold cab home, the papers tomorrow."

Daft Punk meets death metal Tony Naylor on the joys of Justice and Ed Banger records. "The sort of cacophony that hasn't been heard in clubland since Public Enemy were bringing the noise."